Back in the day, Amber Valletta was one of my favorite models. I adored her and Shalom Harlow, and I loved their friendship too ' they were roommates for a time in NYC. Amber still gets some work, mostly magazine editorials and the occasional ad campaign or acting gig. She's 40 years old now. And she's coming clean in a public way about her struggles with addiction. She gave a speech with MindBodyGreen.com which you can see here. This is what she said:

“I suffer from a disease called addiction'I’ve had it for as long as I can remember.”

Amber Valletta, 40, says she started looking for ways to get high since she was 8 years old because she was “uncomfortable being a human being'I sniffed markers, I sniffed glue, fingernail polish, anything that could give me a buzz,” she says.

By the time she was 22 and her modeling career was at its peak, Valletta was abusing cocaine and alcohol.

“I had a multimillion [dollar] deal and I showed up the first day to shoot this campaign high and drunk,” she admits. “I didn’t care and that’s just to show you addiction takes you to the worst places' I was in a business that drugs and alcohol were widely acceptable and they were given to me.” But she takes full responsibility for her actions. “I am not a victim,” she says. “I don’t blame anything that happened to me that was negative.”

Valletta sought help at 25 because she “didn’t want to die'I had to be willing to lift the veil off the shame and say, ‘I’m addict, I can’t do this alone, I don’t want to do this alone, I don’t feel comfortable, can you help me'’ ”

After staying sober for 15 years, the model-turned-actress ' whose new show Legends premieres on TNT in August ' hopes to inspire others by sharing her story.

“My hope is that someone, somewhere in this room, out of this room will hear something that will help them and perhaps get them out of the shadows and the darkness of addiction and bring them into the light.”

[From People]

Is it weird that I was a fan so many years ago and I had NO idea that this was happening' I mean, a lot of people were doing coke in the 1990s (they're still doing a lot of coke now too). But I didn't realize that she was so self-destructive in her early days and she was clean by the age of 25. That's amazing. Fifteen years, clean and sober. Good for her!